My first ever blog! It’s very exciting and I’ve tried to keep my rambling thoughts coherent!
I find my initial thoughts and ideas keep returning to the relationships between humans and other creatures, with water and the earth.
It is the strange yet beautiful microscopic world in the earth that resonates with me, the fossils present in the earth at the quarries at The National Stone Centre, Alex Hyde’s amazing photographs of aspects of crinoids and bivalves. Fungi feature largely in my first drawings, both real and fantasy (think of the giant mushrooms in the original ‘Journey to the centre of the earth’) and the concept of mycelium, so integral to our lives as humans, connecting the adult earthbound being to the earth and also to it’s juvenile earthbound being, in a similar way that scientists have discovered that a lynchpin in the tree- fungi network is referred to as a “ mother –tree”, with the most fungal connections, their roots are established in deeper soil and can reach deeper sources of water to pass on to younger saplings (Science Daily).
I love the idea of this, and think that it can represent the nurturing nature of the adult earthbound being. Insects are present too my first thoughts leaning towards beetles such as the minotaur beetle (which reminded me of the minotaurs, Minoan and of the Auroch that Sally Matthews is creating for the Earthbound project. The keystone of the drawing is the beautiful portraits by Kate Bellis, so the earthbound being really is a fusion of human and the earth. In these snippets of the first tentative designs all of these thoughts are there, and you can see the skeleton of the being, made of fungi, mycelium and crinoids. Next I’ll be working on the layers to add to this, inspired by the incredible textures present in Sally Matthews sculptures, how I can translate these into lines into the beings. I’ll be examining endangered species vital to our connection to the earth, looking at the finds from the Hoe –Grange Cave and (fingers crossed) going on a journey to study some of the amazing work of Maria Sibylla Merian at The Natural History Museum.